


Tasting the Edge

by hellkitty



Category: Transformers (IDW Generation One)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-03-15
Updated: 2011-03-15
Packaged: 2017-10-17 01:15:33
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,370
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/171370
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hellkitty/pseuds/hellkitty
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p> Drift needs this. </p>
            </blockquote>





	Tasting the Edge

_  
**Tasting the Edge**   
_   


**Title:** Tasting the Edge **  
Author:** antepathy **  
Fandom:** Transformers, IDW **  
Characters/Pairings:** Perceptor/Drift **  
Rating:** R/M  
 **Warnings:** Sadomasochism, self-induced mind-fucking, reverse dubcon  
 **Prompt:** Any fandom, any characters, this is the only way I can stop the pain. **  
Summary:** Drift needs this.   
For [](http://community.livejournal.com/dark_fest/profile)[**dark_fest**](http://community.livejournal.com/dark_fest/)   16 Mar 2011  


 

Perceptor had hesitated, at first, when Drift had come to him. No. He had refused. It seemed...a poor recompense indeed for Drift saving his life for him to...do that.And Drift had withdrawn the request, his optics dark, and the feeling that he'd betrayed Drift had punched into Perceptor, as deeply and powerfully as Turmoil's cannon.

He had lost a recharge cycle or two, thinking it over. Could he...could he really cause Drift pain? Voluntarily? Could he bear to see that body—sleek, powerful, beautiful—wracked, damaged, bloodied?At first, the answer had been 'no', deep and resounding from his depths. But then.

But then he had begun thinking, that even that hurt, even that deep revulsion he felt at the very thought, that spark-deep pain at the thought,was merely a currency in which he could pay his debt.What was his discomfort to what he owed Drift?

Nothing.

He had found Drift, several days later. It had taken several days to get him alone: Drift took the rejection as badly as Perceptor had feared—that some great honor he had offered had been spurned, and had been avoiding Perceptor, unable to meet his optics.He had finally tracked down Drift, the white mech sitting in an abandoned closet, optics closed, frozen, it seemed, into one position, his hands on the Great Sword he lay across his lap.

And their gazes had met, and the soft, pleading speech Perceptor had prepared fled from his cortex entirely, so that all he did, all he could do, was gruffly nod his head and say, “Yes.”

[***]

Drift had struggled, which had dismayed Perceptor until he realized that...were Drift to truly fight him, Perceptor stood no chance.Perceptor was by no means Drift's match at hand-to-hand: no one was.Still, even the token resistance had troubled him, the need for it.A turmoil of emotions played over his face as he used his entire mass and leverage to pin one of Drift's arms, kneeling on the elbow and hand, black against Drift's beautiful white.

Drift's other hand swung ineffectually at Perceptor's shoulder, weak slaps that stilled as Perceptor leaned back, closing his hand on one of Drift's short swords.Drift had told him to be...brutal.He’d given no other instructions.

This was brutal, as far as Perceptor could take it.Perceptor drew the short blade, fixing his reticle on Drift’s wrist, calling up his knowledge of anatomical substructures.There.Non-essential systems, right between the significant actuators, no major energon lines. He hoped it would be enough.

He forced himself to look, to keep his hand steady, as he drove the blade through the wrist.

Drift arched up, mouth stretched into a scream with no sound, or, beyond sound. Perceptor could feel the pressure on the elbow servo under his right knee as Drift tried to pull away from the pain.Energon welled around the wound, the thin flexible mesh that covered the inner workings. Perceptor paused.This was far enough?He turned to watch Drift’s face: Drift was hyperventing, chassis heaving, optics glazed and unfixed. 

He wanted to pull the blade out, snatch at the first-aid patch kit he’d insisted on bringing, bury his face on Drift’s chassis and beg forgiveness.

“More,” Drift murmured, barely audible. “More.”

Perceptor rose, slowly.Drift’s pinioned hand flexed weakly.A trickle of energon spilt over the side of his wrist, a blue-purple line heading toward the ground. He stepped over the prone form, optics worrying over Drift’s face, the beautiful lines compressed in pain. He knelt by Drift’s side, reaching for Drift’s other arm, which had flopped over his torso, hand clawing at the blue glass of his windscreen, as if trying to claw its way in. 

Or…free something trapped inside. 

Drift didn’t fight him as much this time. Of course not—his other arm was pinned by the sword.And he knew what was coming: Perceptor could feel the heavy weight of the optics on his hands as he brought the wrist over and down, his smaller scientist’s hands against the heavier armor of Drift’s white forearms. Drift’s hand curled around his as he pushed it to the ground in some gesture Perceptor couldn’t read.This time, he found the juncture between the cables, pressing into the gap with two fingers as he reached for the second sword, a bit awkwardly, with his left hand.Drift’s hand brushed in a caress, gentle, soothing, on Perceptor’s hand. It seemed…grotesque and somehow shockingly intimate. Giving permission, stroking away blame.

Drift’s ventilation was shallow, his optics fixated on the blade, his own blade, about to pierce his light armor, about to become a tool of pain, holding him fixed, trapped, immobilized.There was something in his optics, some mix of anticipation, wanting, needing and yet also fearing and hating.And sensing the rightness of the symbolism—that his weapons be turned against him.

This one was clumsy: Perceptor using his off hand.Drift cried out, an inarticulate sound, as Perceptor’s grip slipped.Energon flooded the wound site.Perceptor closed his optics, leaning onto the blade until he felt it bite through and into the hard ground.

Drift was shuddering, hands opening and closing, weakly.Energon streaked down his wrists—the poorly-done left hand one had energon collecting in the palm of Drift’s hand like an offering.

Drift, Perceptor thought, hadn’t said he couldn’t talk.“Drift,” he asked, quielty, bending over the strained face.

“’m fine I’m fine,” Drift murmured, half-delirious.His body writhed, the white chassis heaving. Perceptor could feel the heat from his overtaxing systems rising off him like a wave.Perceptor raised his hand, brushing it over the white helm’s crest, feeling it almost feverish under his fingers.

And when he lifted his hand away, he stared in horror at the smear of energon he left against Drift’s white.

He couldn’t imagine what Drift was feeling.The pain had to be…intense. White hot lances blaring up from both arms, alarms of pain, compromised capacitors, the slow leak of energon.Why would he want this?

Perceptor ran a hand over the chassis, feeling for heat, hoping to bring some mute comfort.Drift twisted under his hand, pushing into it, as if trying to make even that comforting touch a measure of pain.

“Please,” Drift gasped.

Perceptor bent lower. “It’s not safe.You could become seriously injured.”

“No. Please. More.”The optics were wild, feral.

“Drift…,” Perceptor couldn’t find words.He never wanted to hurt Drift, and seeing him in pain was…scorching something deep inside him. And to feel Drift’s energon sticky on his hands, to know that he was causing it…?

Drift’s optics struggled to pull into focus, targeting Perceptor’s worried face hovering over his.“I’m fine,” he murmured.“I…need this.”

“I don’t know if I can…,”Perceptor shrugged, helpless.

“You can, you can.”Drift lifted his head, straining upward from his shoulders, letting his mouth brush Perceptor’s.Another brush, and Perceptor felt the flirt of Drift’s glossa on his lips. And then Drift whispered words which twisted around Perceptor’s spark like razor wire.“I trust you.”

Perceptor sucked in a ragged vent of air, as though he were the one staked out, impaled.As if he had any right to asking comfort from Drift. He bowed his head in surrender.

[***]

He felt like he was breaking something. Something physical in Drift, something mental or psychological in himself.He…was no longer sure if he knew if it was good or bad.

Drift writhed on the ground, twisting his torso from side to side, moving into the pain, away from it, as though it were twining around his sensornet like a fast-growing vine.He was going to cause excessive damage, Perceptor thought, thrashing against the pinioning bonds. And then they’d be caught and there’d be hell to pay, for both of them. Springer tolerated a lot from his Wreckers, but he would not allow any notion of them hurting themselves after hours.It would cost them both the team.

Perceptor threw his weight on Drift’s chassis, driving his spinal struts flat onto the ground. “No,” he said, “Drift, no.”

“Yes,” Drift hissed.

“We can’t.”

“You have to.” The optics flashed white, incandescent, almost blinding.

“No,” Perceptor said, trying to rise to his feet, giving up, giving in. He’d failed. He’d tried to do what Drift wanted, but…he couldn’t.There was too much at stake. And Drift might hate him for it, but he’d bear that hatred if it meant Drift could stay on the Wreckers, get his second chance.

Drift’s chassis surged up under him, moving from the hip actuators: Drift, hauling himself to sit up, putting strain—terrible strain—on his pinned wrists.

“No!” Perceptor said, throwing himself back down onto the white armor, just as he heard the metal begin to squeal and rip. He could feel, without needing to see, the gush of energon, and added to it, the greenish-yellow of hydraulic fluid, or the white of internal lubricant. “Drift, stop. We have to stop.”

“Make me,” Drift snarled, and it suddenly wasn’t Drift’s face but a feral snarl Perceptor had never seen before. Perceptor scrambled, feeling that even with Drift’s arms immobilized, he was somehow at a disadvantage: He did not want Drift to be hurt, while Drift himself did not care.

His arm braced over Drift’s throat. Drift’s optics widened, his engine rumbling a warning welcoming growl, tipping his throat up, into it. Into it.Perceptor pushed down, away, instinctively, mistakenly, and saw the harsh light in Drift’s optics fade to a kind of bliss.The struggle went out of him entirely, and Drift lay complacent under the hard bar across his throat. No. Yes.

Perceptor shifted position: the forearm was too inaccurate, too broad, too blunt. He might damage something vital. If this…needed to be done, he should do it right.

He shuddered, but forced himself to replace his arm with one hand, squeezing at the throat, fingers seeking—and finding—the sensitive nodes he knew were there, compressing the lateral sensor relay lines.

The optics glowed up, gratefully, the white fading to pale, almost watery blue.He squeezed harder, feeling Drift struggle, feeling the relays throb under his fingertips, but still, Drift arched into it, wanting, welcoming, optics hooding as though with desire.

“What do you want from this?” Perceptor asked, shivering. What do you want from me, he echoed silently.

The optic shutters lifted, briefly, and when Drift spoke, his vocalizer buzzed, tickling against Perceptor’s palm. “Oblivion.”

[***]

Drift had moved beyond shrieking, beyond the choked, ragged sobs that had wrung him out, wrung Perceptor out, as Perceptor wielded the shock rod on his joints.The first had…been the worst: the most horrible thing Perceptor could conceive—that he could do this, that it numbed, hardened, got less acutely painful for Drift, less acutely wrong for him.

He needed a break, and if it wasn’t enough for Drift, Drift would have to add that to his suffering, he thought.

And the thought stunned him.The cognitive step to Drift wanting suffering and Perceptor…not caring.

He slammed the shockrod down, as though that were the culprit, that were the problem. Not…him.

Drift’s frame, which had been braced for another shock, released abruptly.

“Break,” Perceptor said, flatly. Nothing more. He didn’t trust himself with anything more. He sat back on his heels, turning away. He couldn’t bear to look at the wreck he’d made Drift into. It was all the more horrifying in that there was…so very little to see: only the two growing pools of energon from the pinioned wrists. Everything else had left no mark, no visible trace beyond the condensation beaded, harrowed face, the trembling limbs, the optics almost numb with pain.He could feel the heat radiating off the body, almost pounding against his back.He covered his face with his hands.

“Take me,” Drift murmured, his voice throaty, abraded.

Perceptor blinked into his palm. What? No.

“Do it,” Drift said. “Get some pleasure out of this.Fuck me. Hard.”He flexed his pinned hands, awakening the gouts of energon. “I can’t do anything to stop you.”

No! Perceptor recoiled.Drift’s voice grew pleading, a parody of sensuality.

“I want you to.Please.I want to feel you between my thighs.” He wormed his legs suggestively behind Perceptor’s backframe. He lowered his voice to a throaty whisper. “I want to feel you inside me.I want to feel you ramming against me, driving into me.I want to see your face flat with lust, fucking, not even caring who it is. I want you to let go, Perceptor.”

Perceptor pulled away, refusing to make contact, his face a mask of horror. Who was this?Where did this come from? And why, oh Primus why, did his spike leap to the thought?

Drift’s legs moved behind Perceptor, spreading his thighs wide. “I’d open myself to you, if I had my hands,” he murmured.“But I’m right here. Right here, Perceptor.”He rolled his hips suggestively.

This was not right.No.“I want you to,” Drift pleaded—or whatever was possessing Drift now.Perceptor had heard of primitive peoples and their beliefs in demons, possessive forces that addled cerebral programming, but he’d never believed one could exist in their kind.But there seemed to be no other explanation. This was not Drift.This was not his Drift.

“Come now,” Drift pleaded, his optics struggling for control. “Fuck me. Take me.You’ve never refused me before.”

An awful, agonizing blow. Unfair, vicious.Perceptor wheeled around.“I don’t do that!”

“Do what? I want you.Frag, I need you to do it.Feel. Just…feel.”

Perceptor was half tempted, one hand reaching for the panel, feeling, already, its disrupted EM field lancing up at him.

“Come on!” Drift snarled, a thing possessed, almost frantic, needing to link pain with interfacing? Or with pleasure?Drift’s face collapsed, compressed. “Please,” he said, voice pitiful.“I need this.”

“You don’t need this. No one needs this.”

Drift flinched, bodily, as though Perceptor’s judgment hurt worse than anything else, his ventilation hissing sharply.He hypervented, fighting some emotions too black for Perceptor to know their names, before asking, roughly, “What’s the worst pain you’ve ever known?”He locked gazes with Perceptor, demanding an answer.

“You know this,” Perceptor said, unsteadily, his hand automatically reaching to stroke his reinforced chest plate.

“What would you do if you had Turmoil here?Or Overlord? What would you want him to feel?”

Perceptor felt as though he were being led on some dark catechism, but couldn’t see the way, so was helpless to follow where it led. “Hurt him.Bring all the pain that he brought to me, to all of us, onto him.”

“Yesssss,” Drift drew out the sibilant, subsiding back on the ground, nodding, as if Perceptor had agreed with him on some great issue.“Know who mine is?” he murmured, staring at the blank night sky.

Perceptor already knew the answer.

[***]

Drift was reaching his limit, Perceptor thought.For his own part…Perceptor had gone far beyond where he’d thought his were, had cast them aside as useless weight, as things that held him back, made him weak. If Drift could endure, so could he.He would not let Drift down.

But he needed to monitor Drift. Drift would never admit to limits, so Perceptor would have to force them on him. But the right limits, for the right reasons: which were not that Perceptor was weak and could stand no more.Rather, that Drift had had enough.

Drift was shivering beneath him.Perceptor’s weight rested on his left elbow, pinning flat Drift’s left thigh, splayed open, while he deployed a small low-power ionic cutter from one of his fingertips, tracing patterns in the heavy armor.He’d run out of things to do that wouldn’t damage Drift, wouldn’t leave traces that would tell the tale to others, wouldn’t take Drift beyond his own ability to heal, so had settled for writing chemical equations across the flat spans of Drift’s armor, a micron deep. He wished he knew something better, more fitting.Poetry or some elegant calligraphy. But he was who he was, and knew only what he knew.

But he was trying.

Perceptor paused.Drift was staring skyward, vents deep but fast, his chassis heaving.The thigh quivered under the pain, Drift’s entire EM field buzzing and harsh, teetering on the brink of shutdown.He waited, timing how long it took before the EM field stabilized. Longer and longer each time. Yes.Drift was almost done.

He finished what he was doing: a diagram of benzene just at the top of the inner thigh, closing the ring, feeling Drift shake, the EM field disrupt again, before he snapped away the tool and pushed to his knees.

“You’re done,” he said, pitching it as a statement, inflecting it with all the command that a mech who had never commanded could bring to it. He would harbor no argument. Drift must hear and believe and not question him.Neither of them could bear to go any further. Not Drift for his sensor-net—and now, above him, Perceptor could see his blue optics almost hazed green from the incessant flood of yellow alarms on his HUD, like a wall between him and reality and the flow of time—nor Perceptor for his own sanity.

Drift’s head rolled, slowly, as if Perceptor’s words were only reaching him by seeping through a mass of pain.Perceptor hesitated, but steeled his face to sternness.Drift must believe.Because it was true. The optics were hazy and wild, but he managed a nod, bleary, but clear.Perceptor felt his shoulders sag in relief, before rushing to grab the first aid supplies.

When he turned, Drift’s optics were clearer, the irisers behind the lenses spiraled to the same aperture.Perceptor placed the kit on the ground, tugging out the first blade, crying out as the blade left the ground, as it stuck, just for a klik, in Drift’s wrist, before sliding free, lubricated by the energon that seeped from the wounds.He couldn’t bear to look at the puddle under the wrist, the dark stain.

Drift, for his part, made no sound, letting the hand fall limp as Perceptor threw the sword behind him, disgusted, horrified by the smears of energon, the warmth of the blade where it had been buried in Drift’s systems, a vile intimacy. Perceptor dove for the kit, forcing himself, his face a rigid mask hiding the rising nausea, to spread the lips of the wound apart, squirt in the sealant/suppressant, before grabbing the protective tape to close the armor gaps until Drift’s self-repair could kick in.He rose, but before he could step over Drift’s torso, Drift had turned, using his freed hand to jerk the blade from his left wrist, curling onto his side, clutching at the blade.

“Here,” Perceptor said, gently, kneeling down, reaching for the injured wrist.Drift let him patch it, the stained blade against his mouth, whimpering as if Perceptor’s gentle touches, attempts to heal, were more painful than the rest.And Perceptor wondered if this was the way of it, if…sometimes, the attempts to heal were worse than the initial pain. Or if that was just how it was in Drift’s world.

He laid the repair tape aside, kneeling by Drift’s curled form, aching, exhausted, stained hands slack on his narrow silver thighs, empty of thought, of feeling, of anything to say, as wracked and raddled by the experience, in his own way, as Drift was.

And Drift reached up, his bandaged wrist curling over Perceptor’s shoulder, drawing him down, pulling him into a shivering embrace, pressing pain against pain, rawness against rawness, pressing his mouth to Perceptor’s, the sweet sharp taste of Drift’s energon coloring their mouths.

 


End file.
